27 October 2006, Friday

Discover your inner artistic nature with the help of animals! You think going to a zoo is fun? But there’s even more fun with animals than holding them behind bars, and keeping the last survivors of species which were hunted to extinction.

For example, the Faroese, in their traditional art form, use pilot whales’ blood for its pigmenting properties in salt water. Interesting, huh?
Observe the atristry achieved and the subtle hues of red, that tender rouge, contrasting with the deep blue of the sea and the natural greens of the inland.

Trully one of the marvels of art, this activity is also fun for the whole family, here’s a child playing with a whale foetus, it’s just sho shweet!

And for those unbelievers that think this actually hurts the whales, here’s a scientific paper, that clearly shows that all this is carried on in the most humane way possible. It is written by no less than the Senior Veterinarian of the Faroe Veterinary Service, Jústines Olsen, in whose lexicon the term “conflict of interest” obviously doesn’t exist.

From the pre-cubist period comes this American masterpiece, a pyramid of bison skulls. The artists of the time tried to exterminate the source matherials for their medium in order to raise the price of their works, and almost succeeded.

Here is also a modern Canadian work in the style of the classic pointillists, reminiscent of the techniques of Seurat. The intricate pattern of clubbed seal bodies creates a serene image against the unperturbed blue-whites of the permafrost. The cruel public tries to limit the artistic freedom of the artists by protesting against the clubbing of seals, their very artistic medium, outside of the allotted season. This year they managed to yield a mere 300000 of them, which proved quite limiting to their inspiration.

25 October 2006, Wednesday

I surrender, ads can be beneficial to society. Here’s an ad campaign, designed to make women realise that they are put to unfair standarts by the other advertisers and are brainwashed to buy diets, fitness utensils, cosmetics and so on in order to compensate for their non-fashionable looks, hair color, body structure, etc. Funny thought, it seems that on the other hand the company behind the campaign also wants the said women to buys their cosmetics.

While pondering who are the good and the bad guys in the realms of selling cheap chemicals in expensive wrappings, just enjoy the message of the campaign, at least it is true.http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/

Beauty is also blood and suffering. Here’s an another campaign, this time by a Czech animal rights organisation . If you think these images are disgusting, go and browse a bit their site for images of real lab animals. The photoshop work was too mild.

The numbers in those posters, 300000, refer to hurt animals only in the Czech republic! Think of what happens with lab animals on a global scale. I’m not saying that animals should not be used for biology studies or drug testing or work force or food. But I damned well put the line at cosmetics. Here’s a list of subhuman companies according to the organisation.

Back to democracy and software, here’s another article in the NYTimes, “Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.”. Neat, huh! I told you it could be done, only now it’s gonna be used by Uncle Sam to cause fight terror.

“The U.S. is the first nation to have developed nuclear weapons. Moreover, the U.S. is the first and only nation ever to deploy such weapons.”

I would add that “peace” and “democracy” are becoming more and more joke words in the US reality. I won’t say their citizens deserve it, but I won’t say they don’t either. Those two elections surely were faked, but they were also very close tied before the faking.

Not much of a difference in Europe too, there is a paper by a group of Dutch hackers (The funny domain means The “We do not trust voting computers” foundation) who reverse engineered a voting machine and wrote about its weaknessess.

90% of the of the votes in The Netherlands are cast on the Nedap/
Groenendaal ES3B voting computer. With very minor modifications,
the same computer is also being used in parts of Germany and France.
Use of this machine in Ireland is currently on hold after significant
doubts were raised concerning its suitability for elections.
This paper details how we installed new software in Nedap ES3B voting
computers. It details how anyone, when given brief access to the devices
at any time before the election, can gain complete and virtually
undetectable control over the election results. It also shows how radio
emanations from an unmodified ES3B can be received at several meters
distance and be used to tell who votes what.

The security of the thing turns out to be just laughable. The Dutch law apparently required a mechanical lock to be present on the device as a part of its physical security. Well, that’s a fucking retarded thing to do, especially in the Netherlands, where they hold bloody lockpicking contests! Not only that, but all machines use exactly the same key which can be easily purchased for about one Euro.

The software protection of the “maintenance mode” consisted of a hardcoded password, namely “GEHEIM” (Dutch for “SECRET”). At least it is longer than “sex”, “love” and “god” ;)

In their preliminary phase, they also stated on their web site that the machine could “easily be programmed to play chess or to lie about the election results.”, which was (unwisely) challenged by the manifacturer.